The Bard rocks in 'Last Goodbye'

Jay Armstrong Johnson, who plays Romeo, rehearses with the cast of "The Last Goodbye," a new musical fusing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" with the songs of the late rock icon Jeff Buckley.

/ Jim Cox

Jay Armstrong Johnson, who plays Romeo, rehearses with the cast of "The Last Goodbye," a new musical fusing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" with the songs of the late rock icon Jeff Buckley.

Jay Armstrong Johnson, who plays Romeo, rehearses with the cast of "The Last Goodbye," a new musical fusing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" with the songs of the late rock icon Jeff Buckley. (/ Jim Cox)

Now his much-loved music and the Bard’s monumental play are finding a common voice in “The Last Goodbye,” a rock-musical adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” named for a song on “Grace,” Buckley’s first and only studio album.

Jeff Buckley. — (Old Globe photo)

The Old Globe Theatre — an institution rooted in Shakespeare and renowned for shepherding high-profile musicals — is staging this reconception of a show first produced about three years ago in Massachusetts.

“The Last Goodbye” has a new cast and a new director in Alex Timbers, who takes over from Michael Kimmel, the project’s originator and adapter.

But both writer and director say the show, which could have eventual Broadway prospects, retains a remarkable resonance between Buckley’s songs and the Bard’s work.

“The poetry of Jeff Buckley’s lyrics and the themes of loss and longing and mourning are such a great fit with the story and Shakespeare’s poetry,” says Timbers, the much-in-demand director whose résumé includes the recent off-Broadway hit “Here Lies Love” and the upcoming Broadway musical “Rocky.”

“And the more I’ve worked on this show, (the more it seemed) they just dovetail so well. It’s almost a little uncanny.”

That said, Timbers adds, “This is Shakespeare. It’s not our gloss on Shakespeare. It is Shakespeare.

“I didn’t want to do some kind of muted, shiny musical-theater version of (the play). This should be treated with the gravity it deserves.”

Romancing an idea

The concept for “The Last Goodbye” first came to Kimmel in 2007, when he was listening to Buckley’s music on his iPod while walking through Manhattan one day.

The song “Forget Her” came on, and it stirred something in his brain: the memory of an early scene from “Romeo and Juliet” in which the character Benvolio questions his friend Romeo’s infatuation with the uninterested Rosalind.

“Be ruled by me,” Benvolio says. “Forget to think of her.”

Michael Kimmel, who conceived and adapted "The Last Goodbye." — (Old Globe photo)

Kimmel, who was working on a different Shakespeare project at the time, says he “started to see the song as sort of an extension of that conversation. And from there it just became, ‘Well, there’s no way it could work with the rest of the play!’ And little by little we found that it did.”

Eventually, Kimmel put together enough of a rough version to offer a private presentation to Mary Guibert, Buckley’s mother and the guardian of his legacy. (Buckley’s father was the folk singer-songwriter Tim Buckley; he likewise met a tragic end, from a drug overdose in 1975.)

With her approval, a concert reading followed, and finally the 2010 production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Timbers then caught wind of the piece, and as Kimmel puts it: “You’d be crazy if Alex Timbers wants to work on your show, not to say yes immediately.”

Timbers retained choreographer Sonya Tayeh (of TV’s “So You Think You Can Dance” fame) and music director Kris Kukul, but shifted the show’s setting from contemporary back to the original period, and held extensive workshops on various aspects of piece, from movement to orchestrations to design.

As “The Last Goodbye” jelled, Timbers says, he and his collaborators asked each other: “‘OK, if we could fantasize about where we would do a Shakespeare musical, where would that be?’ And it was, ‘Well, the Old Globe would probably be the coolest place you could do it.’ ”

Timbers wound up contacting (via Facebook) Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein, who had helped mentor a workshop version at Joe’s Pub in New York when he was still with the Public Theater, which runs that venue.

Around the same time, the Globe’s planned production of the world-premiere musical “The Honeymooners” fell out, clearing the way for “The Last Goodbye.”

Tricky mashup

Timbers’ point about staying true to Shakespeare seems borne out vividly in a visit to the Globe’s rehearsal halls on a mid-September afternoon.

The sound of clashing swords reverberates through the room as Timbers and Tayeh run cast members through a sprawling fight scene. (The Globe production stars Jay Armstrong Johnson, late of the La Jolla Playhouse-bred Broadway musical “Hands on a Hardbody,” as Romeo, and the relative newcomer Talisa Friedman as Juliet.)

The dialogue is taken straight from Shakespeare, although Timbers and Kimmel say the play necessarily will be abridged to accommodate the 16 or so Buckley songs woven through the show.

Still, the text “is not just connective tissue between songs, which often is how the book in musical theater is treated,” says Timbers. “The Jeff Buckley lyrics are so vivid, and so image-driven, that the Shakespeare can meet it. They actually are in dialogue with each other.”

To Kimmel, “The goal is you don’t always know where Jeff Buckley ends and Shakespeare begins. It’s sort of the best of both worlds.”

That’s maybe easier said than done. Timbers acknowledges that finding tonal unity is “a really big challenge. Any time you’re doing what is essentially a mashup, (it’s) a complicated thing.”

That’s one reason the director decided not to keep the piece in a contemporary setting.

“I think you can mash two things up, but not three,” he says, using the example of a misfiring movie: “You know, ‘Cowboys and Aliens’ — you can have cowboys and Daniel Craig (Hollywood’s former James Bond). You can have aliens and Daniel Craig. But to have cowboys and aliens and Daniel Craig doesn’t always work.”

The production includes a rock band (with some musicians onstage), and the set is dominated by such features as aqueducts and stone arches that emphasize a heavy, subterranean feel.

But it’s the pain in Buckley’s music and the desperation of the “star-cross’d lovers” in Shakespeare’s play that the creators hope will find dialogue with each other.

“What I think is amazing is that a lot of people came to (Buckley’s) work in what was an emotionally tumultuous time for them,” says Kimmel. “And through Jeff they sort of found a voice that echoed what they were feeling.

“People have such an emotional attachment to his music — such a personal attachment. It is that idea of being a teenager and being in love.

I always call it ‘screaming into the abyss,’ where it feels like it never ends.

“And I think that’s something Jeff captured musically that very few people have ever really done as well.”